


I Am Stretched On Your Grave

by elluvias



Series: Baggins and The Smith [3]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Lots of it, M/M, Songfic, guys why did i write this, it hurts, so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-26 02:38:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/645624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elluvias/pseuds/elluvias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's his 33rd birthday and Bilbo has begun the Fading.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Am Stretched On Your Grave

His braids were gone. It was a horrible sickening feeling, queer because he could feel tendrils of hair once more on his face. They were gone. He had taken them out, he had to. What use was there for a hobbit to wear dwarven braids when he was all alone? When his husband was dead, their children gone. Vanished down the long winding road out of the Shire.

There had been little joy to be had at his birthday party. The other hobbits had done their best, 33 was a momentous occasion, an official coming of age. He had more freedom than he had before, supposedly. He’d been an adult for years now in general Shire reckoning, this was just a token that all hobbits went through. It was a birthday whose number was noted, not just celebrated because it was a chance to celebrate life. The first, the thirty-third, and any birthday a hundred and up. All else were just happy occasions, a mark of another year to go by. Hobbits often forgot their own ages sometimes, numbers were a bit trivial to them. There were often so many children in a family, and they were all so interconnected that keeping track of ages grew far too troublesome. So you were either old enough to make your own decisions and be responsible or you weren’t.

And he was thirty-three. He should be happy or...or proud or something. Yet all he could feel was grief, a heart sickness that would not go away. It would never leave him, it would linger, like a slow poison, eating from the inside out.

The well wishers were gone. It was dark outside, the moon, bright and full hung in the sky. It was beautiful, Bilbo noted, and cold. So very cold and distant.

His toes curled in the dirt of the Forge’s floor. It was cold now, another had been erected, a new smith brought. This place had fallen into disrepair, a hole in the roof let a shaft of moonlight in the otherwise blanketing darkness.

Songs were important to Hobbits. There were songs for life and birth, songs for walking, songs for sleeping, songs for drinking. There was also songs for death, songs for mourning. Songs to mark a Fading.

These were never sung in the day, not where children could hear. Oft they were sung at twilight, in the lonely hills of the graveyards. Bilbo had no graves in which to sing at, he had no bodies to lay gently into the earth and plant flowers and trees by. He supposed there were several Fading songs, he had heard snatches of several. Yet he only knew one.

He took a breath in.

“I am stretched on your grave  
And I'll lie here forever  
If you hands were in mine  
I'd be sure they would not sever  
My apple tree, my brightness,  
It's time we were together  
For I smell by the Earth  
And I'm worn by the weather.”

His voice was clear and rung in the forge. A certain stillness seemed to creep into the air. It wove around the area as he sung, reaching out and through the air with a power all it’s own. Then something sounded, like drumbeats, save there were no drums nearby. The stillness shifted, it was like a heartbeat those phantom drums, broken, aching, seeping into the soul.

“When my family think  
That I'm safely in my bed  
Oh, from morn until night  
I am stretched out at your head  
Calling out unto the earth  
With tears hot and wild  
For the loss of a girl  
That I loved as a child.”

Thorin had been no girl. Bilbo could not change the words of the song though. Some had tried, over the years, but whatever strange magic that was connected to the Fading songs were tied as much to the words as they were to what they marked. It would just be a very sad song sung by a very sad hobbit.

“Do you remember the night  
Oh, the night when we were lost  
In the shade of the blackthorn  
And the touch of the frost?  
Oh, and thanks be to the Valar  
We did all that was right  
And your maidenhead still  
Is your pillar of light.”

There was a shuddering pause in the song. Really if he could Bilbo would laugh at the ridiculousness of imagining Thorin as a maiden. No laughter came though, a broken painful spell was being woven. A hobbit could no more choose to sing or to stop singing a Fading song as a dwarf could stop singing a Dirge. There was a time and a place for it and one just _knew_ when it was the time and the place. In the forge on the night of his thirty-third birthday braidless and aching, Bilbo knew it had been time to sing his Fading song, the only one he knew. It had been sung by his grandfather, Old Took. Bilbo shouldn’t have heard it, but he’d been awake at the time. The words and tone had been burned inside him. Such songs never left you, not after witnessing their power.

“Oh, the gossips and mothers  
They approach me in dread  
Oh, for I love you still  
Oh, my life, and you're dead  
I still will be your shelter  
Through rain and through storm  
And with you in your cold grave  
I cannot sleep warm.”

There was nothing to keep him warm. Not really, no children, no lover. Blankets and soft beds meant nothing in the hollow halls of Bag End. There was a sound but not a sound, made in the air around him. It chilled to the bone, raising the hairs on his feet and gooseflesh on his skin.

“I am stretched on your grave  
And I'll lie here forever  
If you hands were in mine  
I'd be sure they would not sever  
My apple tree, my brightness,  
It's time we were together  
For I smell by the Earth  
And I'm worn by the weather.”

It was done, the song finished. Even if no other hobbit had heard his song they would know, all would know when they woke that Bilbo Baggins had begun to Fade. Would he last a week, a year, a decade? No one would know, no one could guess. Yet it marked him now, showed in a way that no eyes could see save hobbits. The power faded in the air and Bilbo hung his head.

In silence he walked back to Bag End and waited no more with hope at his bench looking out at the road.

**Author's Note:**

> I changed the words only a little to suit the world a bit more, but the song is 'I Am Stretched On Your Grave' by Kate Rusby


End file.
